The Role of Healthcare Professionals
As a healthcare professional, you are an important person of trust for athletes at all performance levels. They often find themselves dependent on your knowledge of the anti-doping rules. Your prudent advice and choice of therapies is the best way of ensuring that you and your patients adhere to the anti-doping rules at all times.
Healthcare professionals are important partners in protecting the health and integrity of athletes, as well as in safeguarding clean sport in general.
In addition to the specific medical aspects, all individuals providing medical support to athletes play an important part as role models.
Choice of Medication in Sport
In order to protect an athlete, as your patient, we strongly recommend that you regularly check the prohibited status of any medication you prescribe using the medication inquiry service Global DRO. This status may change following the annual revision of the Prohibited List.
Medication Inquiry Service Global DRO
Topics such as Medical Emergencies, Intravenous Infusions, Glucocorticoids and Asthma
Therapeutic Use Exemptions: Check the Process
If an athlete requires a therapeutic use exemption (TUE), it is particularly important that they receive assistance from the(ir) physician in compiling the application. You can help the athlete to put together a complete application, including the required medical documents.
Many of the TUE applications submitted to Swiss Sport Integrity are not actually required, because they relate to permitted therapies. This generates unnecessary work for the applicants. Since a different process is required for each situation, we recommend using the TUE wizard to identify the correct process to be followed in each case.
Therapeutic Use Exemptions (TUE)
Important: At national level, from January 1, 2021 onwards, it is therefore no longer only athletes assigned to a whereabouts pool who are obliged to apply for a prospective TUE, but all athletes of the TUE Pool.
Legal Framework
In the past, severe sanctions have repeatedly been imposed on medical support personnel who supplied or administered prohibited substances or methods to athletes. The relevant disciplinary provisions of the Swiss Olympic Doping Statute come into play here. Besides that, there are criminal provisions contained in the Sport Promotion Act. These particularly cover offenses such as prescription and application to third parties.
The FMH ethics regulations take a clear anti-doping stance, and establish corresponding guidelines.
FMH code of ethics (German)
Annex 5 to the FMH code of ethics: Guidelines for the medical support of athletes (German)
Support and Contact
If you have any questions, please do not hesitate to contact us.
